Identity is not an argument

How a Marxist theory of class consciousness became a license to dismiss critics

from “Scholars at a lecture,” William Hogarth, 1736

This week, Qassam Muaddi, “Palestine staff writer” at the anti-Zionist outlet Mondoweiss, writes that Palestinian journalists have a kind of reporting authority other journalists cannot match because Palestinians are describing their own lives rather than debating abstractions. “This is why independent journalism is not ideological,” he writes, “because we don’t engage in an abstract debate over abstract ideas about somebody else’s life. We report our lives, and the lives of people around the world for whom basic rights and recognition of their own identity is not abstract.” He adds, “This is why we don’t subscribe to the ‘common wisdom’ labelling of what is ideology and what isn’t. We stick to the common reality of our common humanity.”

What Muaddi is saying is that having a personal connection to a topic in a way that influences the neutral presentation of facts in one’s reporting, otherwise known as a bias, proves you are not biased. He also frames the “neutral,” Western standard of journalistic objectivity as an ideological position, and therefore biased. So being objective is biased and being biased is not biased. Are you fucking kidding me? He also criticizes how Palestinian testimony, which is based on lived experience, gets dismissed as advocacy because, he says, actually holding an ideology such as Palestinianism is so unbiased that he doesn’t even think of it in such common terms as ideology. My, how clever. Muaddi is, in other words, arguing that proximity to the issue, in this case because of one’s ethnicity, confers some sort of epistemic authority, whereas the neutral view of an outsider who is not personally invested in the topic, and therefore less likely to engage in motivated reasoning, is actually the biased one.

It’s easy to understand why Muaddi would arrive at this view. Outsiders are far more likely than Palestinians to disagree with the “common wisdom” found among his people. They are more likely to reject Hamas as a reliable source of information. They are more likely to recognize Hamas as a genocidal terrorist group. They are more likely to see that certain rhetoric is not merely anti-Zionist, but antisemitic. Unless, of course, they’re Irish. The ideas he is expressing is known as standpoint theory, or standpoint epistemology, and this version of the idea is about as textbook as you’ll find. But one sees examples of it almost every week. When Karmelo Anthony murdered Austin Metcalf, I remember black Americans claiming authority on the issue because of the color of their skin. If you’re not black, the logic ran, you can’t understand what it’s like. A similar refrain was heard during the Lindsay Clancy trial. If you’re a man, I saw women say, then sit this one out. A more famous version of this is saying that men should bow out of the abortion debate. Earlier tonight, I read Freddie deBoer’s latest essay, “Nobody Owns Disability,” in which he writes:

Standpoint theory is the notion, popularized in academia, that only people who are part of a given “marginalized group” should have the right to speak on issues related to that marginalized group. Some people will insist that there are more nuanced versions than that, but as a lived discursive reality, that’s what standpoint theory actually is … My immediate response is to say fuck you, I don’t have to live under the burden of regulations I don’t agree with, and I decline to follow your rules in this regard.

Another version of the theory is that if you don’t consult a group member, then your commentary is somehow invalid. But, as seen above with Palestinians, being part of the group is just as likely to introduce motivated reasoning and in-group bias. How are you not to be biased if you grew up in Palestinian culture, waterboarded with Hamas propaganda your entire life, by everyone in your entire life, including your own family, and then you see Israelis bombing your cities, killing your people, and you are supposed to transcend a life of brainwashing, the demolition of your livelihood, and everything you know to be real? Such thinking asks a mirror not to reflect.

In an op-ed last week, “Identity Politics Wasn’t Supposed to Be Like This,” Lydia Polgreen argued against identity-as-authority, writing, “Identity is a set of characteristics you inherit. But what you make of that inheritance is character.” I like this way of thinking about it. To be fair, the underlying reasoning of standpoint epistemology can help create a more balanced, or even more objective, account of the world by including perspectives that may bring information to the table that outsiders would not think to include. My wife tells me the story of how her company never realized one of their buildings wasn’t ADA-complaint because it had no wheelchair ramp — until they hired someone who couldn’t walk. But this is only valuable in subjective accounts. In writing about Lindsay Clancy, I wanted to include some consideration of the madness that many women suffer postpartum, and why I believe many women saw in Clancy something of their own suffering, so I spoke to women in my life and read testimonies by mothers. But if you’re writing about statistics regarding postpartum experiences, such input is irrelevant. You no longer care what it feels like, only what the raw data says. The numbers might be wrong, but the lived experience of a woman is not going to correct them. So where did this come from?

In the 1970s, the decolonial feminist Sandra Harding developed standpoint theory by borrowing from Marxist philosophers like Georg Lukács and Nancy Hartsock, who emphasized the concept of the standpoint of the oppressed. The concept says that people in oppressed positions can, because of their position, see and understand the workings of a social system more clearly and completely than those who benefit from the system. The idea is that domination requires a kind of self-deception or blindness on the part of the dominator. Their comfort, and their ability to maintain a capitalist system, depends on not seeing how that system produces their advantage, whereas the oppressed have no such incentive to look away. The oppressed, therefore, have some special claim to objective truth. And it’s true that people in power have less reason to examine the mechanisms of their power. But it’s not true that the oppressed are any less susceptible to bias. In fact, their very oppression can make them all the more motivated in their reasoning.

Before this, the idea came from Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Hegel argued that the master, who has the slave do all the productive labor, ends up dependent and passive, while the slave, through direct confrontation with material objects, develops a fuller self-consciousness and a truer grasp of reality. Marx and Engels adapted this into a class framework, essentially arguing that the proletariat, precisely because he or she is exploited by capitalist relations of production, is more likely to see through the lies of capitalism to the exploitative nature of market exchange. And while I am no Marxist, I think it’s undeniable that if you’re a slave, you’re more likely to understand that stories about your “freedom” are a lie. In the 1920s, Lukács sharpened the notion into an explicit epistemological claim, arguing not simply that being oppressed made you more likely to see the truth of the system, but that it made you the only one who could see it. The privileged individual, according to Lukács, is incapable of seeing the truth. Suddenly, being oppressed meant being wiser while being privileged meant being ignorant. In public discussions, people began to say that one had to “check one’s privilege” before entering a debate. Hartsock translated this from class to gender in 1983, and Harding named the resulting framework “standpoint theory” in her 1986 book The Science Question in Feminism. And there, at last, we had the term in its modern form.

This is why I consider standpoint theory a disgusting philosophy, because it keeps racism’s core premise intact, namely that mind is downstream of group membership, and that who you are determines what you’re able to know. We’ve seen that argument before. The Nazis had a category for “Jewish physics.” The Soviets had one for “bourgeois biology.” In both cases, people decided whether an idea was true by looking at the person who said it, or by first checking with group members to confirm if it “feels right.” The modern version just flips the direction. Now it’s the people with less power who supposedly see more clearly. Either way, if your knowledge or access to truth comes from your group, not only is that bigotry, but it also means that if somebody in the group disagrees then they aren’t just wrong, they’re betraying their group identity. This is how you end up with people suggesting that if you vote a certain way, you’re not really black. It’s a way for the progressive left to crack the whip against the backs of blacks who don’t fall in line. As President Biden said in a 2020 radio interview, “If you have a problem figuring out if you’re for me or for Trump, the you ain’t black.” In other words, Don’t be a race traitor.

Who Is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?

This is why the whole idea of being “politically black” is so fucking gross and inherently racist and, by the way, Marxist. It just becomes a way of gatekeeping knowledge according to skin color rather than facts, reason, and science. But the alternative to standpoint theory isn’t indifference to lived experience. Sure, ask a Palestinian journalist, a black American, or a postpartum mother what something felt like. But be sure to quote them clearly, for the sake of transparency in service to the reader. Ask them whether a claim about mortality rates or criminal intent is true, however, and their proximity to the pain doesn’t make them a better instrument for measuring it, it just makes them a more motivated one. “I lived it” is not related to “I’m right about it,” and “You wouldn’t understand” is not an argument. Yes, a standpoint can furnish a detail that an outsider would never think to ask about, but the moment a group insists that only its members can judge claims about that group, or that its members must be included in the jury pool of analysis, then that’s not a more honest epistemology anymore. It’s a discursive hiding place, and it should surprise no one that the people most eager to stand there are the ones with the most to shield from an outside eye.